690 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
achieve results not possible under the subject-of-study teaching 
program. That process is inverted. It must be recognized, however, 
that there are enormous variations in children’s capacities for progress 
in various activities and in their susceptibility to suggestion. 
Here appears a danger. A vast difference exists between learning 
nature’s laws in the development of child life and cooperating with 
her or perfecting her processes through the child’s susceptibility to 
leadership, and the skillful exploitation of that susceptibility to 
satisfy the vanity of parents or teachers whose minds are cataleptic 
under the obsession of some educational fetish. We are in some 
danger of entering into an age of child prodigies. 
Objections are raised that education is inefficient because it is 
made too easy. Signs of a reaction have appeared. Now, whatever 
of justice there may be in criticisms of ‘teaching through play,” no 
justice exists in criticisms of the leadership of play. This leadership 
has its biological roots in the evolution of the interrelationships 
between parent and child, and play is not “easy” in the sense of being 
devoid of effort or hardship. Both the intensity and the duration 
of extreme effort in many forms of play activities are so striking that 
few adult activities can be compared with them. 
Play is interesting, but to interpret education as something unin- 
teresting strikes the very nervous system of education with a palsy; 
and to say that because anything is interesting it 1s educationally 
undesirable is surely a survival of asceticism. We have failed in 
education because we have ignored play and divorced education 
from life. 
The dominance in education of the play motive, or real living in 
obedience to real present needs during child life, does not mean that 
there shall be no discipline. Living is discipline. The child, like 
his ancestors from the beginning, is driven by hungers and controlled 
by instincts that are nonspecific. His conduct is largely the product 
of experimental experience, which frequently causes pain as well as 
pleasure. So was the conduct of his ancestors. As a result of racial 
experimentation, the child is born into a complex network of ways 
of acting, both good and bad. Lacking judgment and perspective, 
he is apt to imitate the bad examples in his social environment as 
well as the good, thus forming habits, ideals, and character that are 
bad for him and for society. To mold the ideals developing in the 
child’s experience is the function of the parent and society’s repre- 
sentative of the parent, the leader, or teacher. Discipline by adults, 
like leadership, has its roots in the biological relationships of parent 
and child. 
Practically all the bad habits known to childhood and youth are 
the product of our neglect of this function of leadership. Vices 
develop in play. This is the negative argument for putting moral 
